select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
Fiona fox's blog
A modelling study, conducted by a team at the University of Oxford, reports that digital contact tracing may help slow coronavirus transmission.
Dr Steven Riley, Professor in Infectious Disease Ecology and Epidemiology, Imperial College London, said:
“This is a great idea, backed up by careful science, that should allow us substantially more social freedom in future while keeping COVID-19 cases to very low levels. The concept is that we allow our phones to track our contacts so that if we develop symptoms the app can quickly inform people they may also soon develop symptoms. Contact tracing needs to be fast for COVID-19 because people can be infectious before symptoms. Although there must be some unavoidable trade-off with privacy concerns, its very reassuring that this concept has been developed jointly by medical scientists and ethicists. I suspect the trade-off will be more than worth it for most people.”
https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/for-media
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
None received.